Jim Ingraham: Browns news conference was a lot of white noise

Three and one-half weeks after beginning the exhaustive worldwide search, white smoke emerged from the chimney above the indoor practice facility in Berea, announcing to the pigskin public the warm and wonderful glad tidings.
We have a new coach.
Say amen somebody.
Finally, we can all now get on with our lives. Call in the dogs. Turn off the searchlights. The manhunt is over.
For the sixth time in seven coaching hires since 1999, the Browns, bless their groping-in-the-dark little hearts, have hired as their new NFL head coach somebody who has never before been an NFL head coach.
Hey, if it ain’t fixed, you can’t break it, right?
Something like that.
The new guy, the latest guy, the guy it took the Browns three and a half weeks to find, probably because he was busy not interviewing for any of the other numerous head coaching jobs that were available, is Mike Pettine.
“He’s smart, innovative, demanding and tough,” said embattled Browns owner Jimmy Haslam.
Pettine is also anonymous, inexperienced, and, depending on who you believe, the Browns’ Plan B, C, D, E, F or maybe even G in The Great Meandering Coach Hunt of 2013-14.
Thursday’s news conference to announce the hiring of the next coach the Browns will fire was that rarest of events in which the coach being hired was overshadowed by and almost a footnote to the dubious machinery that hired him.
Asked a few days ago about the state of the Browns’ coaching search, ESPN’s John Clayton was bluntly succinct.
“Confused,” he said. “A mess.”
That was one of the kinder evaluations nationally about Team Haslam’s seemingly scattershot, unfocussed, shrimp boat net castings for candidates. Anyone with a whistle and coaching shoes seemed to be on their interview list.
While the several other teams who were looking for coaches hired theirs in a timely fashion, Team Haslam careened endlessly through the marketplace interviewing everyone this side of Hillary Clinton while looking for a leader not just willing to lead but, no small point this, willing to work for them.
For most of the search you couldn’t tell without a scorecard the number of candidates who rejected outright the Browns’ interest. This was, after all, a management team attempting to hire its second head coach 12 months after hiring its first head coach.
Pettine, who will be one of three head coaches on the Browns’ payroll this year — the other two are being paid not to coach the team — said he doesn’t care about any of that.
Asked if the firing of Rob Chudzinski after 11 months on the job was a red flag about working for the current Browns’ regime, Pettine said, “That was not a factor at all. I didn’t want to back away from a job because of a perceived lack of security.”
Then how about this? Thursday’s “well, we finally got around to hiring somebody,” news conference had to be the first ever in which a team official made a joking reference to himself as a member of the Three Stooges, and the new coach, who is bald (get it?), as Curly — as did, at one point, that old thigh slapper Joking Joe Banner.
There was a punchline in there somewhere, but Joking Joe took the scenic route and is still somewhere up in the hills looking for it, but I do give him credit for trying.
(Pettine, thinking to himself: “The Three Stooges? What’s that all about?)”
Speaking out loud, Pettine did say he wasn’t dissuaded by the image of the Browns’ organization as a rumbling, stumbling, bumbling clown car.
Pettine’s reasoning: “There are only 32 of these jobs in the world.”
Or 34, if you count the other two head coaches the Browns will be paying this year.
In reality, it didn’t matter who said what in Thursday’s latest “here’s our coach” news conference. Browns fans are tired of them. The media is tired of them, and so would be the real Three Stooges, if they were still around.
It was all just so much white noise.
Haslam and Banner spoke, saying or implying a lot of the same things they said when they hired Chudzinski a year ago. Pettine, who seems like a decent guy, with a rugged drill sergeant countenance that at least makes him look like a coach, seems like he gets it. He knows he’s walking onto the front porch of an eye-rolling fan base that has been here, heard that before — ad nauseum.
“Nothing I can say or do today matters. I’m not into winning the press conference,” said Pettine.
“He’s a perfect fit for our team and our fans,” gushed Haslam, trying to win the press conference.